Dismemberment
We can approach Hangsaman with this upheaval of the “unnatural” in mind, too. We can read the seemingly “unnatural” quality of the detective voice as an expression of the ubiquitous alienation produced by girlhood under patriarchy, rather than as an incomprehensible ailment isolated to Natalie alone. Another moment exemplifying this strategy occurs slightly later, still early on in the novel, one morning, in which Natalie’s father, Arnold, a writer and laughably pretentious academic, reads and reviews several pages of her journal. This exchange acts as a father-daughter ritual, in which he assigns her writing prompts and reviews them later on, cloaked in the guise of writerly mentorship, but increasingly revealed to be far more perverse, a form of emotional grooming that is not necessarily sexual but contains the qualities of an uneven, false romance. After Arnold lightly praises, then critiques, Natalie’s latest piece of writing—an assignment to write about him, notably—Arnold starts to explain that she will likely begin to feel some form of “resentment” for him as she becomes a young woman, but such dislike is expression of a normal, primal “sex antagonism,” to which Natalie reacts internally:
If it’s happening why does he tell me? Natalie thought briefly, and heard from far away the police detective demanding, “Are you prepared to confess that you killed him?” For a long minute her father looked at her, obviously expecting some answer which she was unable to give; Natalie, her mind moving swiftly, went back over what he had said: what had there been, for instance, which indicated what she was to say? Had he asked a question, perhaps? Made a false statement she was to correct? Praised her, to hear her disclaim modestly? (14)This moment repeats what seems to be a reflexive reaction for Natalie at this point: her own interiority becomes subject to scrutiny and thus, rather than acting externally, she splits narrative structure itself. To express her true discontent to her father would require a breakage in a patriarchal script he’s repetitively enforced; he is always “obviously expecting some answer which she was unable to give.” Here, the focalization splits and changes yet again: from “Natalie thought briefly” to the “far away” voice of the detective demanding an answer, and, all the while, her father waits impatiently for her attention to recenter on him, for her to fill the role of clever, modest daughter he’s assigned. The potential for outright defiance slips away, but the splitting of focalizer and focalized agent implies, yet again, a means of dissociation, of Natalie from herself. Not coincidentally, this dissociation occurs precisely at the moment Natalie questions her father’s authority: “If it’s happening why does he tell me? Natalie thought briefly, and heard from far away the police detective demanding, “Are you prepared to confess that you killed him?” This splitting may be read, as it often has, as “schizophrenia,” but to integrate the subversion of “unnatural narratology” so visible in Patchwork Girlhere, too, would suggest that this dissociative focalization is actually Natalie’s method of self-mediation, of expressing her rage and unease in the only way she can without sacrificing her place in a patriarchal narrative. This constant, uncanny mediation isn’t only an effect but a survival strategy, too, arguably always generated by the experience of girlhood.
Reread in this context, Natalie’s reliance upon the detective figure and multiplied voices becomes legible as more than a symptom. This dissociated focalization appears, it seems, to most scholars—primarily male, incidentally—to be an unequivocal expression of a cut-and-dry pathology, diagnosable as “schizophrenia” or “dissociative identity disorder,” as if the two were interchangeable or even relevant. To cite one example, of which there are numerous, Wyatt Bonikowski diagnoses Natalie’s character immediately in his article on the figure of the “demon lover” in Shirley Jackson’s works: “But Natalie is also schizophrenic, and because of her marginal position in relation to the Symbolic, her ‘writing’ is largely symptomatic, emerging not through the signifier but ‘in the real’ as hallucination.”[9] Such a simplification, I’d argue, misses the forest for the trees and reinforces a vision of a “natural” and “unnatural” narratology via a tidy labeling. Indeed, perhaps this effect is a symptom, but not of schizophrenia, or some locatable pathology; perhaps the malignancy is not located in Natalie but in the patriarchal conditions and trauma she is subjected to, over and over, in the ways she is forced to metabolize those experiences. If we read each “voice” embedded within Natalie as disparate organs strewn about an urn, following Patchwork Girl, we might perceive the disconnect between herself and her experience more clearly. The voice of the detective arises, at first, as an interruption of the “real” or external conversations or experiences Natalie is having, but upon further examination, this voice might actually be a means not of disruption but of integration, of dissociative narrativization as survival-strategy, as, even, internal resistance on Natalie’s part that shapes the reader’s experience—thus becoming “real” in itself, tangible.
[9] Bonikowski, “Only One Antagonist,” 69.